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Gentoo Reviewed

Posted by michael on from the drink-the-koolaid dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Nick Petreley over at LinuxWorld.com gives the uninitiated an excellent view of what the world of Gentoo is like."

2 of 381 comments (clear)

  1. Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo by HBI · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The docs are just fine for getting the job done. Your grandmother won't be able to use Gentoo, but she shouldn't be, either.

    The step by step install docs are easily ten times more understandable than my first install of Slackware back in 1994. I have yet to see any *BSD install docs that rise to that level.

    Chaotic? Hardly. Get something like Kportage (there are GNOME manager applications too) and it makes a lot of sense and is easy to throw in new ebuilds which work out of the box, and run well since they are compiled for your arch. It's pretty nice to have multiple versions available of different libraries and applications, which will auto-update based on emerge -u world.

    If you hate the GPL that's your own religious issue.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  2. Why I like gentoo.. by windows · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine.

    Unfortunately, there's no consistent way to cleanly remove things that I compile. And keeping track of the dependencies is next to impossible to do. I don't like to clutter up my directories with files and directories that aren't needed anymore.

    I'm a big fan of the ports collection in any BSD because it solves both of those problems. Everything is compiled on my machine and later it's simple to cleanly remove stuff I'm no longer using.

    Gentoo also has a ports collection, which is why I chose it over other Linux distros. Debian is quite nice but I have yet to find a way to use some packages from stable, some from testing, and some from unstable, while still having everything getting along. I like almost everything else about Debian, but that's what frustrates me about it, and why I give Gentoo the nod.

    It would be nice, however, to have a more automated install process in Gentoo. I'd like to be able to choose being doing it myself and starting from any stage, or being able to use an automated install program like other distros have. I'm not asking for a lot, but just something as simple as Slackware's install program would be a nice touch.

    That being said, I use Gentoo, and I like it a lot. :)